


The Thing About Immortality

by attack_on_feels



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Gen, Krem is there for like 3 seconds bc I love him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:00:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25160533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attack_on_feels/pseuds/attack_on_feels
Summary: A mortal being touches a strange rock and becomes immortal.Shes not happy about it.I wrote this a few years ago, it was loosely inspired by a Solas/Lavellan dynamic but wasn't explictedly Dragon Age. I decided to edit it and make a kind of modern day/AU Fic out of it bc i liked the concept and wanted to Solavellan it properly.Not that I actully got past awkward introductions for these two. There is no romance here but if I ever write more, they'll get there.
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	The Thing About Immortality

She looked at him like he had five heads. In fact, he mused, five heads would probably be easier for her to process. Mutations occured all the time in nature, there was very likely a poor, five-headed being out there somewhere living a mundane and sad existence. He wondered if it might be cruel for a five headed person to be given immortality. Surely life for them would be fraught with insults, pain and ostracism? Of course, as a person who had lived thousands of years with just one head, he might just be biased in the notion that one head was the superior way to be. This would require further investigation and reflection at a later time, for now he had to address the issue of the girl. 

  
Like all of her kind, she was simple and had little understanding of the world around her. How could she possibly have dedicated the time, knowledge and focus required to truly experience the truth of the world? 

  
Her stunned silence at the revelation that she was now a superior being didn’t bother him. He was accustomed to conversations that took place over months or sometimes years, the participants languidly mulling over their thoughts to in order devote the time to truly consider and embrace new information. Such was the means to fully immerse themselves in the divine joy of interpersonal connection and to foster an honest and deep understanding of another soul.   
It was why his people were inherently peaceful. You could not truly hate someone when you could take them apart piece by piece, watch them, learn to think as they do, learn them in the most intimate way possible. Among The People it was said that “we may not agree, but your mind is in my heart.” They were all a little in love with each other. It was unavoidable. 

  
He wondered how long it would take her to form such a connection with him? Would he enjoy her mind? The prospect of delving into a fresh mind was not an unpleasant one. It had been a long time since he’d felt the joy of learning something truly new.   
But it seemed that she was done with her fleeting silence. 

  
Her eyes were wide and wet and her voice shaky as she spoke.   
“Ok. Ok so say, if I believe you, and that’s a big if, then what happens now?”

  
He tried to convey a sense of sympathy. “You live. You spend your time doing whatever you wish. Personally, I spend the time in study and contemplation.”

  
“Contemplation?” She hissed, baring her teeth in a feral kind of anger. “Oh yes, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of fucking time to contemplate the deaths of everyone I’ve ever known and loved. Shall I study the faces I’ll out live? My mother? My brothers? The woman who fucked up my coffee this morning? You speak of immortality like it’s a gift. Fuck you. Fuck your curse. Change me back.”

  
He had wondered when she would become angry. It had seemed a highly likely response given the emotional upheaval she currently endured. When she had first laid her hands on The Orb that drew her into his little realm, she was confused and upset.

As he began to explain who he was and what she would become, she had reacted incredulously, her accusations of insanity slowly turned to accusations of malice as it dawned on her that he was telling the truth. He’d used the simple fire summoning spell that he usually used to prove that magic was real. He never quite knew how mortals existed in their magic resistant state. He supposed they didn’t since they ended up dying so young. Potential aborted before it could ever hope to achieve proper sentience. 

  
“I am not responsible for your changed state da'len.” He doubted she could comprehend, but pushed on anyway. “The Orb is responsible. Its power is creation and life drawn from The Fade it's self, a power that I have tapped into for my own purpose and yet one that I do not command. If The Orb has drawn you within and gifted you with magic than I cannot reverse the outcome. All I can offer is knowledge. I’m sure that’s why it brought you to me. It would have been crueler to imbue you with the power of the undying and force you to discover the blessing only when your fellows aged around you even as you stayed vibrant and youthful. It’s a small mercy, but all that The Orb can give.” 

  
She was pacing now, anger was causing her new magic to spit and sizzle. He allowed his own magic to creep out and diplomatically smothered some of the small fires she had absentmindedly started.

“It's a rock. You speak of it as if it alive. As if it thought this through. It’s a fucking rock and you give it more respect than you do to any of us “mere mortals.” 

  
“It’s not a rock da'len." He responded, sourly. "The Orb is an ancient and powerful artifact. One that has magic and intent enough to deserve our respect. One that has seen something in you that is worth preserving.”

  
“Fuck your rock. Fuck your knowledge and your blessings. I want to go home. I want to die like a regular person. I want to think that people who believe in magic are stupid new aged hippies that smoked to much pot and put too much stock in wishful thinking. Tell me, if I decide to die can I? You don’t need to die of old age. Most people don’t. There’s a million ways to die if I need to, right?”

  
She was bordering somewhere between hysterical and horrified. He’d discussed the right of death with his kin before. It was something that most of his kind only needed to consider occasionally in a hypothetical fashion. He wondered how it felt to go your whole life (as short as that is for a mortal) expecting to die, knowing that it was an inevitable and unchangeable fact, only to have that constant threat soddenly removed.  
Perhaps it was a form of Stockholm syndrome, she had been held hostage by the concept of death for so long that its absence was unimaginable and terrifying for her. And then there was the survivors guilt that come with knowing all those around her would perish, save for him and his people. Their people now. He truly pitied her in that moment. His reply was cautious, hoping to reassure, not to encourage.

  
“Yes. If you truly wished, you could end your life. Your magic will make you a lot hardier than the average elf however a sharp blade will still pierce you, poison will still weaken you and a bullet will still destroy your brain.” 

  
In actual fact it would take an unfathomable amount of damage to truly kill her but he decided that she could be eased into the facts later. For now, the knowledge that death was not completely lost to her seemed to sooth her somewhat. She stopped pacing.

  
“I'm tired. I can still sleep right? I don’t have to be awake forever?” She looked exhausted at the prospect. 

  
“Yes, you can sleep. In fact that’s what I was doing here before your arrival woke me. I can bend the fabric of this place to create a comfortable place to rest if you wish.”

  
She hesitated. “I won’t sleep for fifty years or something insane will I?” 

“No. You haven’t been awake long enough to sleep that long. You will have a regular sleeping pattern for years to come yet.”

\-----------------------------------------

  
Treya considered running.

She considered faking her death or something. That’s the sort of thing that would happen in a movie. The protagonist would decide that slipping away and cutting all ties was the best way to deal with their new found immortality.

She thought about her family never knowing what had happened to her. She could imagine them describing her absence as “out of character” and “devastating.” Lack of contact was unusual for her. Even the few days she’d spent in where-evert-the-fuck-she-was would have her family in a frenzy. They’ve probably already called the police. 

She sighed. She was getting better at the whole “putting her own needs first” thing that people were always harping on about but this seemed a little much.

She had agreed to stay with What’s-His-Name until such a time that she stopped accidently setting things on fire. She would feel a bit bad if she immolated her Clan after all. They we’re very aggravating most of the time so it was actually a fairly legitimate concern. At least everything here in the matrix rock was a fabrication, otherwise she’d have blundered about setting her new mentors things on fire for the better part of a week. Not a great basis for a mutually beneficial student/mentor relationship. 

  
Well, he would be her mentor. Right now she was learning the barest level of control. Soon, she was going to go home, tell her Clan that not only was she ok, but practically incapable of dyeing. Live her life as a mortal, see how that ends up. Eventually, he assured her, she'd track him down and their training montage would begin in earnest. She asked if he’d expect her to carry him around her back and lift rocks with her mind and was delighted to see him genuinely baffled. It was comforting to prove that there were things she knew that he didn’t. She wondered if he’d watch Star Wars with her one day. He’d be the only person in the last 20 years to be caught unawares about the whole “I am your father” thing. 

  
She wondered if the ancient being next to her had ever watched a movie before. He liked books apparently. He had a library here but he said it was impermanent and that when he left the place would cease to exist, however he did have a full library in a more physical location outside.   
She couldn’t help but wonder, what good is loving books when they’re going to crumble to dust like everything else? She was at least thankful that her deathlessness (an actual term he’d used that he assured her was a real thing that he didn’t just make up) had cropped up in the internet age. She trusted that the internet would be as immortal as she apparently was. 

  
Fuck, everyone in the world for infinity was going to die except for them. She should really find out his name. She imagined centuries of “heyyy….you’s?” and “oh hows it going……..mate?” and chuckled dryly. She had been rather rude to him. What if they spent their shared immortality being catty and rude at each other? Ugh. He didn’t seem to be mad at her and to be fair she’d had rather a bad time recently. She had heard once that the mind could not properly conceptualize death. It was a defense mechanism put in place by evolution so that the various races of Thedas didn’t all don black clothing, layer on thick eye liner and sit around writing bad poetry about the futility of existing when their only true destiny was oblivion. No, that would not be conducive to survival amongst the “mortal species.”  
………..

  
Wait.

  
Was she a member of the same species still? Was she still an elf or was she something different now? Oh Gods, she was already starting to think like him. 

  
He saw mortals as abortions or something. It would be hilarious except for how vulnerable she felt being alone in his company. If she was nothing to him then what ethical reason did he have to put up with her? It was all very……thinky.  
It was the reason she hadn’t spoken much. She was too busy trying to not contemplate life, mortality and death and failing spectacularly. She understood why the people were not encouraged no to dwell on the topics. It was depressing and for about twenty minutes yesterday she had fully convinced herself that nothing in the world truly existed except for pumpkin scones. She attributed that episode to the mental flogging her poor brain had endured recently. Being in a fantasy matrix made by a rock certainly didn’t help with her grip on reality.

\---------------------------------------

  
Someone knocked at the door.

  
It had been two weeks since she had entered the rock. She had decided to keep referring to The Orb as "the rock" because every time she did, Solas got this look of helpless desperation on his face that silently begged her to acknowledge the “beautiful and ancient purpose held within it.” 

  
Maybe playing dumb wasn’t the best way to entertain herself with an ageless, ancient wizard-dude but she found herself attempting to needle any kind of emotion from him other than “smug but concerned.” She wondered if that was an actual emotion. 

  
It was during this transformative contemplation she heard the knock at the door. Solas didn’t seem surprised as he made his way to the door and gave a wierdly formal greeting that would sound cool coming from the mouth of a character in a Tolkien novel, but made *him* seem like a pretentious douche.

“Well met. Welcome to my home.” 

  
She was torn between rolling her eyes and getting back to her contemplating. The new comer would give her a lot of new material. The realization that she had mocked Solas for saying that he dedicated his long life to study and contemplation around the time they first met made her feel like kind of a dick but she was also super pissed that she had unintentionally slipped into the habit herself. 

  
Apparently the person at the door was a human man named Krem that had come to deliver milk. 

  
She blinked.

  
‘You deliver milk?” she asked, utterly baffled.

In the time she had been in the rock, food and drink had appeared as if by magic. There was an old fridge in the kitchen that was always stocked no matter how much she took from it. She looked at Solas curiously and and was shocked to see that he was blushing a little. 

  
He took the milk from the man and handed him his payment. She was sure he created the coin out of nothing like he did most everything in this place. A thought struck her.   
“Is he rea-“

  
His hand shot out so quickly it took her a second to realize that it was forcefully clamped over her mouth. The milkman looked a little disturbed by their odd behavior but ultimately decided to not mention it. She chalked it up to him being familiar with Solas’ weird personality. He gave them an awkward wave as he left and she very distinctly heard him mutter “well that was odd” as he drifted away. 

  
The door was shut firmly before she smacked him firmly on his bald head. “The fuck was that?” she demanded. 

  
He peaked out the window, and they watched Krem walk down the garden and rejoin the main street. He stopped and greeted a woman pushing a pram before continuing onto the next street. Apparently Solas really wanted to make sure the milk man was actually gone.

  
“Your words would have philosophically destroyed the world.” He said simply. She waited for more information. None was given.

  
“I was going to ask if he was real or a fabrication. And if he had of heard the answer it would have destroyed the world?”

  
“Philosophically, yes.” 

  
“Oh I do not like where this is going.” She sighed. 

  
“Would you like to come to the conclusion yourself or have me tell you” 

  
“No just tell me. Otherwise I’ll imagine every possible horrible thing. Go on, quick like a band aid.”

  
“I am not familiar with a “band aid.” He replied. 

  
“And clearly you’re not familiar with the idea of not drawing out a painful experience. Mother's mercy, just spit it out..”

  
“He was an accident. You know this place is constructed by my will interacting with the raw power of the Fade housed within The Orb.   
Well, I’d been here for a long time even by my standards. Things on the outside we’re changing…. rapidly. I figured I’d come here to let the latest mortal advances continue without having to constantly struggle to understand them.  
I’d wait, read, enjoy my time here and allow things on the outside to settle. Except I became……..lonely.” He seemed extremely embarrassed at the confession, though he soildiered on with his tale regardless. “I have spent far more time alone on other occasions and it usually doesn’t bother me. I simply contemplate the nature of loneliness and use it as an opportunity to grow. And so, I begun that process but was distracted momentarily by a fleeting thought; that I could use some more milk, and just for an instant I remembered a time not long prior when I had a man come to my door once a week to deliver milk. I must have subconsciously wished for even that level of personal interaction and I guess I inadvertently…..created him. Or at least a replica.”

  
“Ok. So you made him exist. Accidently.”

  
“Yes.”

  
“Isn’t that, I don’t know. Irresponsible?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“So if you we’re so lonely than why not just go talk to someone?" Treya asked gesturing ti the bustling street outside. "Are you one of those shut-ins or something?”

  
“There was no one.”

  
“What, there was just you in an empty city?”

  
“There was no city. There was no world outside of this house.”

  
She considered that for a minute.

“OK so you accidently created the Milk Man. How’d you get from that to a whole city”

  
“Not just a city.”

  
“Country?”

  
“No.”

  
“Theres a whole world in this fucking rock!?”

  
“There is an entire universe in The Orb.”

  
“………….How.” It was a demand. Not a question. 

  
“The artifact is powerful, it filled in the blanks. You have a man, he needs a family, a life, a city, a country. A species. A food chain…… A world.

A world and its inhabitants need to be made of atoms. Atoms need to be made through fusion, through the catastrophic destruction of the stars themselves. You cannot have a man exist from nothing.”

  
“YOU ACCIDENTLY CREATED A UNIVERSE BECAUSE YOU NEEDED MILK?”

  
“Admittedly, not my finest act.”

  
“And so if you leave…this place can't draw on your will and it all falls to ruin? Like your books?”

  
“It will have never existed at all and neither will Krem The Milkman. I created him, therefore I’m responsible for ensuring he can live his life to the highest possible quality.”

  
“You’re a God.” She whispered. ‘Your very literally a God here.”

  
“That is an oversimplification......but essentially, yes.”

  
“Ok. Ok I’m having to deal with a lot of difficult concepts recently so I’m not going to react to this as much as I normally would……How would I have philosophically destroyed the world?”

  
“His life is a simulation, yet he is sentient. He has thoughts, feelings, desires.”

  
“He delivers fucking milk.”

  
“He does... “I think therefore I am.” He is real, however the universe I have created because of him is not. The other people that populate this place are props. I created him but the world was created around him. He shaped it. This makes him a keystone. As long as he believes this place is real it IS real. In his own mind at least, and that is the only worthwhile mind this place has created. What do you suppose would happen if Krem The Milkman realized the world was not real? If he viewed it as you do, as an inconsequential fabrication?”

  
“The world would lose all meaning.”

  
“Yes.”

  
‘But he’s mortal. This whole world means nothing when he dies.”

  
“Yes. The world would continue as a simple fabrication holding absolutely no meaning or sentience for as long as I and The Orb were connected.”

  
“Can’t you just, I don’t know let him out?”

  
“No. His mind is real but outside of this place he has no physical body. Besides, his whole world would be destroyed. Where would he go? What would he do? How do you mourn a wife and children that are dead because they never existed in the first place?”

  
“Fuck.”

  
“A reasonable sentiment”

  
“So what, you’re just going to stay in here till he dies or something?”

  
“Yes.”

  
She looked surprised. “Hes like twenty-something, he could live for like another 80 years!”

  
“Which is nothing for me. I can give the man 80 years.”

  
‘But everything is a lie? This is some Truman Show shit and the moral of that story was “Don’t make up a pretend society and let some dude think it’s real.”

  
His blank stare let her know that he had no idea what she was talking about but she was basically thinking out loud at this point. She paced as she spoke.

  
“But then again, Truman left the fake world because he had the ability to enter the real one, which Krem The Milkman cannot do. What’s the right thing to do here? Letting him live a meaningless existence cannot be the kindest option can it?”

  
“It’s the best solution I’ve come up with although it’s certainly not ideal.”

  
“Hey Solas?”

  
“Yes?”

  
“Is this world an exact copy of our world?”

  
“I believe so”

  
“So there’s another fucking magic rock in here somewhere.”

  
“Yes. There is a duplicate of *The Orb*” he emphasised his correction, which she ignored.

  
“Uh huh. And another me. And another you in that duplicate rock.”

  
“Most likey.” He said with resignation. 

  
“Having this exact conversation?”

  
“If they exist than that’s almost a certainty.”

  
“And they think that the world outside of their particular rock duplicate is the actual real world………Just like we think our world outside of his dumb Orb is the real one?”

  
Solas was silent for a long time.

  
‘Fuck.” He whispered softly.

  
“You hadn’t considered-“

  
He cut her of swiftly and with urgency. “Don’t finish that sentence. Don’t even think it. Just don’t. It seems….safer not to.”

  
She didn’t quite know how to describe how she felt about the revelation. Then she remembered something.  
“Solas?”

  
“Yes.” He sounded a little exhausted by now.

  
“Is “smug but concerned” an emotion?”


End file.
